ABSTRACT
At least since Aristotle, poets, and their translators and critics, have held steadfast to the idea that poems resist either paraphrase or translation. Philosophers, cognitive scientists, and linguists, however, either ignore this skepticism or dismiss out of hand the idea that it is anything special to poetry. The genre of "missed connections" allows great variation in the specificity with which participants and their encounters are described, and in how these descriptions are organized. Readers' engagement with poetry involves an open-ended process of exploring the articulation of a poem for deeper insights into its meaning. The process of inquiry is a process of regimentation. It asks us to link words directly with the world; to make distinctions naturally, usefully and consistently; to articulate standards for setting boundary cases; and, thereby, to develop a shared fix on the questions under discussion and the ways people might resolve them.
